Larry Wall Quotes

At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better.

Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

Mark Hammond is working in this area, with Windows Scripting Host. It is definitely an area where Python fits almost perfectly. That's quite independent from Java, actually.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.